How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well-Being:
Evidence from a Surve of 10-13 Year Olds
Juliet Schor, PhD

I will be presenting research findings from my book, Born to Buy, particularly the work presented in Chapter 8.

After years of neglect, the nation is finally waking up to the threat that junk food marketing poses to our children. The next step is to expand that awareness to the larger “junk culture” which children’s commercial culture has become. My research, which I will share today, has found that not only is commercial culture making children more materialistic, it is also making them sick—depressed, anxious, and more prone to frequent headaches, stomach aches and boredom.

Children’s unprecedented involvement in commercial culture has been well documented, in studies of ad exposure, time spent with media, consumer patterns, and attitudes toward money, materialism, and consumer culture. In the research I will talk about today, I asked the question, how is this heightened involvement affecting children’s well-being?

I answered the question by surveying 300 children ages 10 to 13 in urban and suburban Boston in 2002 and 2003. In this survey, I developed a new measure of the kids' level of "involvement" in consumer culture -- in addition to their media exposure, which is the usual standard. I asked questions about how much they were psychically tuned in to the values and aspirations of consuming, such as how much they cared about having a lot of stuff; how important designer labels and a nice family car were to them; whether they usually were focused on acquiring something new; and how much they wanted to be rich and wanted their parents to be richer.

Some of the major results from the survey were that children who scored higher on the consumer involvement scale were more likely to become depressed and anxious, to have lower self-esteem, and had a higher frequency of headaches, stomachaches and boredom. I also found that media affected children, not directly, but through its tendency to raise the level of consumer involvement. Among the suburban kids whose parents were more restrictive about consumer culture, I also found that the more they bought into that culture, the more negative they were about their parents, and the more likely they were to fight and disagree with them.

While the model shows that children's well-being is affected by consumer involvement, it does not explain how. One possibility is that people who are envious of others and worried about possessions and money are more likely to be depressed and anxious. Alternatively, higher consumer involvement leads to less time spent in reading and play that enhanced well-being. This is a topic for further research.


JULIET SCHOR PHD (juliet.schor@bc.edu) is professor of sociology at Boston College, a founding Board Member of the Center for a New American Dream, and author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner 2004). She also serves on the board of Commercial Alert.